Scanxiety...

...you'll not find me at the head of any queue to applaud or to use a neologism. Modern, new fangled in quite that sense, words are mostly rubbish. An OED from the late 1950s is generally all I ask or need.

There is, though, one such word I cannot avoid acknowledging quite hits the spot and that word is 'scanxiety'.

Not come across it? Lucky you then say I. For it has but a single, narrow usage in circumstances that the user cannot call in any way a pleasure.

A swift analysis points the way clear. Not hard to unravel that scanxiety is a simple conflation of 'scan' and 'anxiety'. Any further explanation necessary?

Well if it is, then this is it. When one might have, has or did have cancer - or in my situation that far more rare disease of soft tissue sarcoma - one will be subjected to a pretty unending sequence of scans of one kind or another. An X-ray here, a CT scan there and everywhere there is the MRI tube waiting for custom.

Each of these various scanning devices is planned to take that greatly needed look into the very inside of one. That way, and only truly that way, can any decent medic worth his or her white coat tell what is there deep in one's very being.

Signs and symptoms of cancer/sarcoma are legion, but true diagnosis requires that scan. So a scan - or dozen - one has to have, and when one does have it as I shall tomorrow one tends to be somewhat anxious as to the outcome. Just what will the films and plates show? All clear and on one's way back to ordinary living, or au contraire, not all clear, something ghastly and lethal found, and now on one's way to - well not to put too fine a point on it in my own particular situation - perdition and doom.

The terrorist has said - rightly if horridly - "You have to be lucky every time. We only need to be lucky once." Metastatic sarcoma says it too.

So far, so lucky. Whether one is to be lucky once more tomorrow we simply do not yet know.

Hence, not unsurprisingly, the scan anxiety and hence, neologically speaking, the 'scanxiety'. Even seven years from initial diagnosis and two years after one was told not to expect or anticipate a recurrence, one still frets when the moment to scan once more comes as it does.

Not a happy word, but then not a happy feeling.

"Drink, feck!" as dear Fr. Jack would say. This fellow here rarely takes his scans without a hangover. Has worked so far, so why break a good pattern? Cheers!